Alexander Hamilton:
"a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy, the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent."
-- Letter to Theodore Sedgwick,July 10, 1804
"It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."
-- Speech on June 21,1788
Elbridge Gerry (Declaration, Constitution, governor, vice president):
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want [do not lack] virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.
-- Madison's Convention Notes, May 31st
John Adams:
"Democracy will envy all, endeavour to pull down all, and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand, it will be revengeful, bloody and cruel."
-- Letter to Jefferson, July 16, 1814
"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-- Letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814
John Quincy Adams:
"The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.
-- Speech April 30, 1839
Fisher Ames (Author of the House Language for the First Amendment):
"A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way."
-- Speech on Biennial Elections, delivered January, 1788.
The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness [excessive license] which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.
-- "The Dangers of American Liberty," February 1805.
"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."
"..democracy that pollutes the morals of the people before it swallows up their freedoms."
James Madison:
"...Government capable of protecting the rights of property against the spirit of Democracy"
-- Letter to Jared Sparks, April 8, 1831.
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Thomas Jefferson:
"The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?"
-- Letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813
[Some "Jeffersonian Democracy" -- miko]
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
John Randolph:
"I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality."
[No wonder there is no indication in the original Constitution that either the electoral college, senators or representatives should be democratically elected. -- miko]
